John Reginald Richardson (1912 in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada – 25 November 1997 in Fremont, California) was a Canadian-American physicist and one of the dominant figures in cyclotron development. His many achievements include participation in the first demonstration of phase stability, the development of the first

synchrocyclotron A synchrocyclotron is a special type of cyclotron, patented by Edwin McMillan in 1952, in which the frequency of the driving RF electric field is varied to compensate for relativistic effects as the particles' velocity begins to approach the spe ...

and the first sector-focused

cyclotron A cyclotron is a type of particle accelerator invented by Ernest O. Lawrence in 1929–1930 at the University of California, Berkeley, and patented in 1932. Lawrence, Ernest O. ''Method and apparatus for the acceleration of ions'', filed: Janu ...

. Richardson grew up in Vancouver until his family emigrated to the US in 1922. He studied physics at UCLA and was a doctoral student in nuclear physics of

Ernest Orlando Lawrence Ernest Orlando Lawrence (August 8, 1901 – August 27, 1958) was an American Nuclear physics, nuclear physicist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1939 for his invention of the cyclotron. He is known for his work on Enriched uran ...

at the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

, receiving his PhD in 1937. After a year at the University of Michigan, he became Assistant Professor at the University of Illinois. From 1942 he worked on electromagnetic isotope separation for the

Manhattan Project The Manhattan Project was a research and development undertaking during World War II that produced the first nuclear weapons. It was led by the United States with the support of the United Kingdom and Canada. From 1942 to 1946, the project w ...

in Berkeley and Oak Ridge (calutron). In 1946, after the discovery of the phase stability and the synchrotron principle by Weksler and Edwin McMillan, he collaborated with a group of physicists consisting of Ed Lofgren, Ken MacKenzie, Bernard Peters, Fred Schmidt and Byron Wright in converting the fixed-frequency 37-inch cyclotron at Berkeley to the first synchrocyclotron. This success not only provided the first demonstration of the phase-stability principle but also confirmed the feasibility of converting the large Berkeley 184-inch cyclotron from a classical cyclotron to a

. An even bigger sector cyclotron with energies up to 520 MeV was built by Richardson's line at TRIUMF in Vancouver. From 1971 to 1976, Richardson was the director of the laboratory, where he oversaw the construction of the cyclotron. In 1991 he received the

Robert R. Wilson Prize The Robert R. Wilson Prize for Achievement in the Physics of Particle Accelerators is an annual prize established in 1987 by the American Physical Society (APS) to recognize and encourage outstanding achievement, ordinarily by one person but sometim ...

.Wilson Prize Recipient

Notes

References

*Craddock, M. K., and D. J. Clark (1999) "John Reginald Richardson." Paper presented at 15th International Conference on Cyclotrons and their Applications TRI-PP. Vol. 98. * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Richardson, John Reginald 1912 births 1997 deaths 20th-century American physicists University of California, Los Angeles alumni University of California, Berkeley alumni Manhattan Project people University of Michigan faculty Canadian emigrants to the United States